Social Sciences and the Humanities

I came across this interesting article the other day, about universities and the humanities:

They have generous compensation, stunning surroundings and access to the latest technology and techniques of scholarship. The only thing they lack is students: Some 45 percent of the faculty members in Stanford’s main undergraduate division are clustered in the humanities — but only 15 percent of the students.

With Stanford’s reputation in technology, it is no wonder that computer science is the university’s most popular major, and that there are no longer any humanities programs among the top five. But with the recession having helped turn college, in the popular view, into largely a tool for job preparation, administrators are concerned.

“We have 11 humanities departments that are quite extraordinary, and we want to provide for that faculty,” said Richard Shaw, Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid.

The concern that the humanities are being eclipsed by science goes far beyond Stanford.

I wonder if the inclusion of weirdo "social sciences" under the humanities umbrella has anything to do with declining enrollment. These days, people want JOBS when they get out of school. Education is too expensive to pad your transcript with Womyn's Studies or Being Gay in the 21st Century.

Some professors are incorporating the current generation's tether to technology to garner interest in their fare:

At Stanford, digital humanities get some of that vigor: In “Teaching Classics in the Digital Age,” graduate students use Rap Genius, a popular website for annotating lyrics from rappers like Jay-Z and Eminem, to annotate Homer and Virgil. In a Literary Lab project on 18th-century novels, English students study a database of nearly 2,000 early books to tease out when “romances,” “tales” and “histories” first emerged as novels, and what the different terms signified. And in “Introduction to Critical Text Mining,” English, history and computer majors use R software to break texts into chunks to analyze novels and Supreme Court rulings.

Yep, being proficient in Rap Genius will land you a killer-good job. Or not.

I'm glad to see schools concentrating on STEM fields, but I think that every college graduate should have an basic understanding of philosophy, literature, art, and languages. What do you all think?